The Holy Network: Espionage, Assassination, and the Vatican's Hidden War 1939-1945

The world's smallest sovereign state had no divisions, no tanks, no codebreaking machines, and no independent supply of drinking water. It could be walked across in twenty minutes, and its entire military establishment consisted of a hundred Swiss ceremonial guards whom the Pope had quietly ordered to train on submachine guns. Yet between 1939 and 1945 this 109-acre enclave, surrounded on every side by the capital of a belligerent power, became the most extraordinary intelligence environmen...